Fancy a free, Do It Yourself 3D printer?
p2pnet news view | Cool:- A couple of years back, “Would you pay $5,000 for a desktop printer — one that prints out a solid, 3D object,” p2pnet asked, referring to IdeaLab’s Desktop Factory.
So how about a DIY 3D printer?
“I was voting on Sourceforge Community Choice awards, when I found this,” says a Reader’s Write, referring to RepRap.
It’s the home site of Adrian Bowyer (top) and Vik Olliver who suggest, “Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer.”
Then, “Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you’re in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.”
Now that is the epitome of cool.
Say Adrian and Vik »»»
RepRap is short for Replicating Rap id-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right – a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn’t even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500).
That way it’s accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world.
Oh! The Horror! You can hear the Captains of Corporate Industry turning over in their coffins!
Adrian and Vik go on »»»
Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRapGNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can use it to make another and give that one to a friend …
… adding
Not counting nuts and bolts RepRap can make 60% of its parts; the other parts are designed to be cheaply available everywhere. This is an interesting coincidence: we can make 60% of our proteins; the other parts are evolved to be cheaply available everywhere…
The primary goal of the RepRap project is to create and to give away a makes-useful-stuff machine that, among other things, allows its owner cheaply and easily to make another such machine for someone else.
To increase that 60%, the next version of RepRap will be able to make its own electric circuitry – a technology we have already proved experimentally – though not its electronic chips. After that we’ll look to doing transistors with it, and so on…
Definitely stay tuned.
[NOTE: I posted this a while back and half of it went missing for some unexplained reason. And the comments were closed too. I'll try and figure out how to open them again. Cheers! - Jon ]
RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.
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July 10th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Ive seen this before, you had me confused I thought they came up with a new version of it. This is the future, print a machine from a machine that then prints machines!
I think this is probably how skynet began.
July 11th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Makes the future of piracy intresting… Pirated everything from vacuum cleaners to hairbrushes! Makes the piracy of music look small fry in the bigger scheme of things!